Fun fact! In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Kool-Aid Man was an actual man, Nathan Koylaid, a former U.S. Army youth hydration specialist who roamed the country in summers with a crude remote hydration detecting machine that took up most of his Willys truck. When he detected levels of intense dehydration (among children especially) he would drive to them, often breaking through fences and walls, and forcibly re-hydrate them with a sweetened water admixture, dyed bright colors to differentiate it from the dangerous chemicals he also carried. His eventual arrest for multiple instances of property damage and assault made him famous, and the anthropomorphic pitcher we know now as the Kool-Aid man was based on him.